The weather has been rather dreary in what little of this year has transpired, so it is almost logical that my first article of the year for this publication might be similarly pessimistic. I was invited specifically to write about my expectations for 2023, so I invite readers to prepare to be depressed over the next couple of pages.
In short, 2023 will probably be a continuation of 2022 in many ways. For example, the war between Ukraine and Russia will remain an orgy of bloodshed and hysterical moralising with no end in sight. Ergo, Western political actors will continue to exploit the war for global brownie points, weakening their militaries and frittering away their citizens’ taxes to keep the useful distraction to the burden of responsible governance the war has provided since last February. That said, the overwhelming worldwide focus on that war should stop some (but not all) flashpoints elsewhere from becoming all-out conflicts, notably in Taiwan, Kosovo and the Aegean Sea. Not all proxy sponsors are in the right places to give a space where armed conflict could occur, but it might end up a different story for the possibility of Turkish intervention into northern Syria and of Azerbaijan into Armenia.
Speaking of domestic politics, the picture is not much rosier. Yes, Rishi Sunak might fulfil his “promise” of falling inflation through simple laws of economics at the bottom of a cycle, but his inevitable attempt to take credit will undoubtedly ring hollow with the masses. One cannot read inflation like poll numbers, meaning the price rises are already embedded into economic reality alongside the below-inflation wage growth. Consequently, the strikes will rumble on for at least the first half of this year as the trade unions try to extract a victory from kicking a government when it is down. It has seemed to me that Mick Lynch and company want to re-enact the ‘Winter of Discontent’, but the reduced scale of unionised workers in proportion to the overall workforce will not make life as holistically dysfunctional from striking alone as it was during the mass strikes of the 1970s. I guess their ambitions, borne out by romanticised period role-playing, are at least typical of the present time. After all, similar fantasies which only the children of later Cold War politics are capable of conjuring drives the foreign policy situation I discussed earlier.
This is an excerpt from “Provenance”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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For My Ex-Libertarians
The United Kingdom, and especially the Isle of Great Britain, has a very particular legal quirk that sets it apart from Western Civilisation, and possibly most of the uncivilised world as well. There is no legal right to self-defence. Everyone knows that to some extent, “guns are banned” in the UK, and we’re nothing like those silly Americans who can carry so-called assault weapons in Wall-Mart. Yet most Britons will be surprised to learn that non-lethal options such as pepper spray are only available to law enforcement personnel, and that possessing any product “made or adapted to cause a person injury” (aka the most effective way to reasonably defend yourself or those around you) in a public or private space is against the law. Instead the ladies and gentlemen of the UK may purchase a rape whistle, as politely suggested by the West Yorkshire Police on their “Ask The Police” webpage. The UK is so averse to the concept of self-defence that in 2012, American Self Defence instructor, Tim Larkin was barred from entering the country by Theresa May during her stint as Home Secretary.
This is a stark contrast to the continent, where countries like Austria, Germany, and Hungary have strong, codified legal definitions of self-defence with “stand your ground” laws, as well as the option to carry things such as bear spray, and with an easily obtainable permit you can even carry pistols capable of firing rubber bullets or CS gas pellets. In France, similar laws apply, pepper spray, gas pistols capable of firing CN or CS Gas are available to any law-abiding citizen above the age of 18. Whilst carrying them in public for self-defence is not a valid reason, French law stipulates you may use them lawfully to defend your house and person. Of course, there are still problems here. Stéphane Charbonnier, the director of the famous Charlie Hebdo magazine and sports shooting enthusiast applied for a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence, this permit was denied, and he was told he could rely upon his police protection. We all know what happened next.
Following the various terror attacks across France in 2015, the French government permitted all police officers to carry their service firearms whilst off duty. Compare this to the UK, where outside of Northern Ireland, only specialist police are allowed to even think about firearms and have very little support from the government or the courts when they do shoot, despite their enshrined right to kill in service of the state and his Majesty. Imagine if Westminster had decided to arm all British city police services after the Murder of Lee Rigby, or in 2017 after multiple violent terrorist attacks across Britain. Imagine a Britain that allowed off duty police or even current or ex-servicemen the ability to carry a firearm in public for the purposes of self-defence. I digress, the arming of the British Police is another debate for another time.
This all seems rather reasonable and modern, two European democracies with modern, democratic attitudes towards personal self-defence, but that’s not all. Countries like Italy and Spain allow high risk individuals and business owners such as jewellers or cash transit guards to carry firearms on their person, or to be kept in a secure location at their place of work. There are similar laws like this across the less developed nations of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But what’s extremely interesting, is that right in the heartland of Europe, there are two countries that stand alone when it comes to modern European firearms and self-defence law, Austria, and Czechia (formally known as the Czech Republic). Both of these countries permit civilians to own firearms for the express purpose of self-defence, and even allow civilians to carry them (Czechia) or very conditionally (Austria). The majority of all firearms held in Czechia are held for protection, and more than half of all Czech firearm owning citizens have a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence. Austria has some more specific use cases, but the general legal position is that if you own any sort of firearm, or any other kind of legal weapon for that matter, it can be used to lawfully defend yourself or your property. Austrian business owners or employees of said businesses (with express legal permission from the owner of the premises) can carry their firearms within their private premises but carrying prohibited weapons in public is illegal without a lawful reason. I don’t need to attack your brain with graphs, stats, and differential equations to prove to you that modern European nations with clear self-defence laws that empower victims with the ability to neutralise threats quickly and effectively to their person, their personal liberty, and their property are better places to live in than any major British city.
If you cannot effectively defend yourself or your property, how can you be expected to defend your country? In 2013, after Lee Rigby was brutally executed on a busy street in broad daylight, there was a lot of discussion about how people in the background are just carrying on with their own lives, walking past the two-blood-soaked Islamic militants as if public beheadings were just a normal part of life in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. A similar discussion has opened up regarding the recent rape case on the tube, about how other passengers just sat there and let it happen. The general public is aghast and shocked at such cruel indifference. But all official documentation from government and law enforcement officials in the UK recommend non-intervention, that your best choice of action is to merely alert the authorities and wait. And even then, there’s a possibility that even a police officer acting in the course of their duty to protect the general public, can be charged with murder. The current UK legal system requires all violent action towards others to be “proportional force” to be considered lawful self-defence, but how do you calculate what is proportional to a man raping an unconscious woman right in front of you? Surely in this instance you apply the most efficient and effective method you have at hand, regardless of how much damage is done to the assailant?
With the official legal advice of the government and all Law Enforcement in the UK advocating a form of learned helplessness, it’s no wonder that when confronted with difficult and violent situations, many can only watch in horror as they wait for the equally ineffective authorities to arrive and diffuse the situation. Now what happens if you are a young woman, and after calling for assistance you are greeted by Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens? After that incident, the complete indifference to the “Near-Eastern Ceasefire of the week” public disturbances, and the overall lack of an effective police presence across any British Urban centres, what’s the point in calling the police? They won’t arrive on time, and it’s more than likely they’ll have you sleeping in a cell when they finally get there.
My own personal experience of the ineffectiveness and apathy from the British Police Services, was last year, when my mother’s car was stolen from her drive in the early hours of the morning. Already prepared for the Brazilification of the UK, the car was equipped with a tracking device. Being model citizens who know better than to engage in vigilantism, we scoped out the location on google maps and informed our police service that the car had been stolen, but we could also provide the police with the approximate location, aiding with the investigation and bringing about swift justice to car thieves! After all this isn’t South Africa, where you have to bring your own pen to the police station to report a crime. Amidst the excitement, our local police service informed us that since the car was now located in Outer London, the case would have to go through a lengthy transfer process to the Metropolitan Police Service before anything could happen. This process could take hours or days depending on how busy things were, and things are always busy for the Met. This immediately put a damper on the celebrations. Who knew how long it would be before the tracker was found, and the car relocated to a secure location beyond the reach of google street-view…
The deskbound officer heard our dismay and informed us that car theft in the UK currently follows a rather specific modus operandi. Cars are stolen to order by professionals, who then take the cars to out of the way locations, blocking the car from view with vans or other large vehicles, then they leave the cars alone until multiple stolen cars can be transported in bulk to the coast and then shipped off into the unknown. Then the officer told us that we could, as private citizens, retrieve our own property, as long as we believed that it was safe to do so. Yes, you read that correctly, the policeman who took our call, told us to go get our car back by ourselves, and to bring proof of ownership and identification because we would most likely be stopped by the police on our way home as we would be in the possession of an “un-stolen vehicle”. When I heard this I actually belly laughed, it was like being back in South Africa again. Nevertheless, we decided to sally forth.
As South Africans, our natural instinct was to reach for the 9mm for some insurance. Sorry, this is a civilised western nation, you can’t have that anymore. And even if we could, British laws would criminalise us for bringing anything with us for self-defence, and we would potentially receive greater punishment than any of the car thieves if we had anything on us which could be used to harm another person. To cut a long story short, despite assurances from police that someone would be dispatched to make sure we weren’t bleeding out on a dodgy council estate, we retrieved the vehicle with zero assistance from the police. It was located on an estate covered in bits and pieces of various luxury SUVs and Saloons, with masked youths cutting up cars on driveways in broad daylight. If anyone came at us with a knife or blunt instrument, my only effective means of self-defence would’ve been to hit them with my car, certainly a gross violation of “proportional force”.
This is what made me realise that the British Police and the legal system have completely failed the ordinary person. We were explicitly told by the police that if we ever wanted to see the car again, our best course of action would’ve been to retrieve it ourselves, providing that “it was safe to do so.” How is retrieving a stolen vehicle from a council estate safe in any capacity? Is “safe vigilantism” the future of law and order in Britain? The British police outsourcing law and order to the general public is not a recent phenomenon, and there have been many other cases where the police have been dependent upon law-bending civilians to enforce the peace.
Now if we were Sikhs, rather than dreaded White South Africans, we would be well within our rights to carry a blade during this endeavour because the legal system makes an exception for a weapon that has to be carried at all times “for religious purposes”. That religious purpose is explicitly self-defence mind you. Despite the fact that carrying any kind of blade explicitly for self-defence is a gross violation of UK law. Quite famously during the 2011 riots, Sikhs took to the streets with swords, bats, and all manner of weapons to defend their communities, and instead of the police disarming the sword-wielding paramilitary forces and dispersing, the Sikhs were praised by the Prime Minister! If I took even a rounders bat with me to rescue my mother’s stolen car I would’ve gone to jail.
The interesting thing about this Sikh tangent, is that the Seax, the famous historical general-purpose knife of the Anglo-Saxons, was considered to be a status symbol of a freeman, and that anyone without one was possibly a serf or a slave. Could an Anglo-Saxon freeman lawfully carry a culturally and religiously significant object like the Seax in modern Britain?
The 2011 August Riots revealed a long-held apathy within the police and the law enforcement caste of the United Kingdom. Across the country, militias appeared outside of Turkish barber shops and kebab bars. This mass mobilisation was welcomed across the political landscape, with no minister brave enough to question why these businesses and community centres had a surplus of edged weapons and baseball bats conveniently ready for an occasion like this. The EDL came out in force in Enfield and North London, and were reprimanded by the police and political establishment merely for being present. None of them were armed with more than an England football shirt, yet received none of the praise the middle eastern baseball enthusiasts got from the then Prime Minister, David Cameron.
I was going to conclude the article there, but since writing began, three more events have come to attention. On the 30th of December, 2023, roughly 50 men from the London Eritrean community gathered in Camberwell, armed with bats and wooden planks, injuring four officers and disturbing the public good. Apparently only eight individuals were arrested during this act, when you can clearly see countless men violating every British weapon law, as well as assaulting police officers and vehicles with weapons whilst the police seem only capable of timidly backing away. 50 or more Eritreans with cudgels fighting a pitched battle with the police, barely any news coverage, less than a quarter of the perpetrators arrested… Why? What’s the point in even showing up? Let the Eritreans bash up their own embassy if you’re not going to arrest them, it’s probably better they harass their own government rather than vent their frustrations on ordinary Londoners.
The second event was the reveal that Lawrence Morgan, the Jamaican Gangster whose deportation flight was prevented by a jumped-up Cambridge grad who now resides in Norway, was scheduled to be physically removed after a string of violent firearm related incidents. In 2016 Lawrence Morgan was imprisoned for only five years and ten months after being charged with the unlawful possession of a firearm, ammunition, and controlled substances. Another two-year sentence in 2017 for drugs charges, and then in 2020 he is caught on CCTV footage participating in a lethal Birmingham gang shootout whilst riding a small bicycle. No murder or attempted murder charges, despite the battle causing the violent execution of his associate, and Morgan himself caught on CCTV firing a pistol with intent. Jailed again in 2021 for only five years. The authorities attempted to deport Lawrence Morgan in 2023, if they fail to do so again (Border authorities have reportedly hired a hanger to stage deportations since they have become completely incapable of doing their job) Lawrence Morgan will most likely be back on the streets of England in a few years’ time. Ideally Lawrence Morgan would’ve been deported after his first firearms offence, but the only reason the authorities have attempted to deport him now was because in October last year, UK prison governors announced that British prisons were rapidly approaching full capacity. How many failed deportations do they let you have before they grant you citizenship?
And thirdly, a horrific chemical attack was carried out by an Afghan Asylum seeker, one let into the country despite a history of violent and sexual offences. The police now seem incapable of finding him and have publicly lamented that it’s “sooo difficult” to find someone who doesn’t use their bank card or a mobile phone. The forces of the state have no issue when it comes to keeping track of every football fan who has ever gotten a little rowdy at an away match, but a violent sexual predator can disappear into thin air as long as they stay away from their smartphone. As an ordinary citizen, no rape whistle or panic button can defeat a lunatic armed with even a small quantity of a corrosive substance. What can you possibly do when threatened with life changing injuries and or death? The legal precedent of proportional force would suggest that ordinary civilians should disfigure or maim an acid attacker, instead of putting the threat down with a human and instantaneous response.
Idris Elba and other lionised television gangsters such as the Labour party have begun a call for the complete ban of items such as machetes and “zombie knives” aka any large single bladed knife or sword, like the various kebab knives and industrial cutting tools that many people use for work, daily life, and the odd riot prevention. Nevermind the fact you’re more likely to be stabbed to death by a supermarket steak knife or B&Q screwdriver than meet your end facing an authentic katana or antique sabre wielding urban youth. There has been nothing from these public figures about controlling the usage of drain cleaner or any other household substances that can permanently disfigure or kill someone, but tools and items used by ordinary citizens, historians, law abiding collectors, and specialist craftsmen must be taken away because their mere existence corrupts the urban children and encourages them to embrace gang culture. As usual, our politicians would rather punish law abiding citizens instead of actually attempting to tackle why the urban populations of Britain prefer smoking weed and carving each other up instead of going to youth clubs and boxing gyms.
I expect Lawrence Morgan and other violent Jamaican gangsters will be back on our streets on “good behaviour”, in no time, and other local roadmen will be offered shorter and shorter sentences. Violent schizophrenic, with a history of incidents, Valdo Calocane, who stabbed three people to Death in Nottingham is not being charged with murder, but manslaughter. Following this trend, after a few years of medication and observation in a secure hospital he will undoubtedly be released back into the general public, to make room for more aggressive mentally unwell individuals.
We can no longer rely upon nautical building accessories like Narwhal Tusks, and have a sensible European approach to the legal right to defend one’s self, one’s property, those around you, and that which you hold dear. If you look at prior days of infamy, such as the Siege of Sidney Street or the Tottenham Outrage, when doing battle with violent aliens, the forces of law and order were joined by armed civilians giving chase themselves, or equipped and supported by civilians. Conveniently enough, the fact that the police during the Siege of Sidney Street were armed with firearms provided by a local gunsmith is left out by almost all official sources such as the BBC and London Police museum exhibitions.
With the appropriate equipment, perhaps it would be possible to galvanise the British public and restore even a semblance of law and order to Urban Britain. If at least one person had ready access to an incapacitating weapon like pepper spray or even a concealable firearm on London Bridge that day, five people would not have been stabbed. Across all of England’s terror attacks and similarly violent incidents, there are multiple references to bystanders resorting to desperate and weird items to defend themselves with like skateboards, tusks, or ornamental spears from historical displays. Granted pepper spray won’t do very much against a Christmas terror-lorry barrelling towards you but merely knowing in a violent situation you would be capable of doing more than cowering in fear and waiting for the royally appointed death squads might encourage the British population to have more of a spine.
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On Freedom of Navigation
Amidst the present difficulties in transmitting knowledge from one generation of educated people to the next, one principle that seems to have been mislaid is freedom of navigation. This has been laid bare by commentary on the recent Anglo-American operations in the Red Sea against the Houthis. Hence, it is worth offering a short explanation of freedom of navigation: what it is, its history prior to its modern codified universalisation and its defences up to the present.
Before its codification by the United Nations, freedom of navigation was part of customary international law, by its nature quite distinct from how modern international law is established and enforced. It originated in the Dutch Republic’s rule of mare liberum (free seas), coined by influential Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1609, which considered neutral ships and their goods inviolable on the high seas. Naturally, this could benefit trading powers like the Dutch, but came into competition with competing Consolato customs. These were named after the Aragonese Consulate of the Sea, both a body to administer maritime law and a collection of maritime ordinances codified since at least 1494. These rules determined neutral ships could be attacked in times of war to seize enemy goods, but even on enemy ships neutral goods could not be taken. By the seventeenth century, Consolato was often paired with the concept of mare clausum (closed sea), coined in 1635 by English jurist John Selden, which held that areas of the sea could be entirely closed off from foreign shipping. Both principles were supported by the major naval powers of the day, including England, France and Spain.
As was the case with a number of pivotal concepts in European history, mare liberum was often fought for over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first by the Dutch alone but later by the nascent American Republic and the Russian Empire as a right of neutral states. The cause of freedom of navigation was greatly assisted during this period by the Dutch victory in the Eighty Years’ War against Spain, as well as the later decline of Spain and Portugal as dominant powers who had attempted to apply mare clausum to the New World’s seas. Another conceptual innovation emerged to resolve some discrepancies between the rival customs in 1702, as Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek formulated that maritime dominion corresponded with the distance coastal cannons could effectively protect it; the range of the most advanced cannon at the time was three nautical miles. Beyond the Dutch, naval powers still employed the Consolato principle into the nineteenth century against other countries, especially during major conflicts, but this could be superseded in treaties by freedom of navigation. Ultimately, this became the case for all European powers at the end of the Crimean War in the 1856 Declaration of Paris Respecting Maritime Law, which synthesised the two customs into a rule that enemy goods were covered by a neutral flag whilst neutral goods could not be seized on enemy ships. Arguably, this built upon the Congress of Vienna’s grant of freedom of navigation to key European rivers, which constituted multiple states’ new borders and economic arteries, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The exceptions to the rule outlined by the 1856 declaration were effective blockade and contraband, whereas privateering (in other words, state-sanctioned piracy) was confirmed to be abolished. As Europe proceeded to dominate the world in the nineteenth century, so too did the inviolability of neutral commercial shipping and their freedom to navigate the seas as their juridically innocent business permitted.
Of course, the growth of freedom of navigation did not result in the disappearance of piracy, nor pirate states. For instance, the United States, Sweden and Sicily fought wars against the Barbary corsairs in the early nineteenth century to ensure the freedom of their merchant ships from ransom and enslavement in the Mediterranean, despite only Sicily possessing an obvious interest in the region. In recent weeks, the Houthis have proven themselves to be another such pirate state through their rather indiscriminate attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. In response, Britain and America (with support from several other countries) have attempted to neutralise this threat to freedom of navigation under Operation Prosperity Guardian. In theory, this should be the least controversial Middle Eastern intervention conducted during this century thus far, since the Houthis are plainly violating the neutrality of benign ships under neutral flags. At the time of writing, there is no hint from the intervening powers of the neoconservative adventurism which defined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor strong intentions to impose changes on Houthi internal affairs beyond the immediate issue at hand. In practice, the war in Israel has entirely toxified any discourse surrounding events in the Red Sea. Instead of realism, one witnesses what is allegedly another instalment of the clash of civilisations. Whatever the merits of Samuel Huntington’s thesis of contemporary world affairs, such hyperbolic reactions to events in the Red Sea overestimate their significance.
If America did not exist, it would be in India or China’s interest to assert freedom of navigation in the region due to its foundational importance to the global economy. Readers should bear in mind that the principle has only a tangential relationship to a nation’s trade policy. Although freedom of navigation is a precondition of free trade, it does not determine the extent to which a ship’s goods are impeded from accessing markets at port, only that the international movement of goods can occur without undue harassment. Perhaps a handful of countries at most could be expected to subsist today to a reasonable standard without substantial trade, an interesting notion in itself but beyond the scope of this article. Likewise, most, if not all, nations lack the naval strength to forcibly guarantee the security of their commercial shipping worldwide, given the sheer volume and frequency of post-containerisation international trade. This means freedom of navigation ought not only to be remembered by readers, but as a matter of historical preference and present necessity defended into the future.
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Destabilisation, not Conquest: Russia’s Real Strategy
As the crisis in the Ukraine drags itself on, it’s become quite clear that the Russian strategy from the start has not been conquest or even necessarily annexation, but a destabilisation campaign.
As I wrote earlier this year, Russia’s style of warfare is intended to displace populations and destroy civilian centres. Alongside this, Russia has claimed and supported the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, almost definitely to create a buffer region between Ukraine and Russia. Regardless, when I wrote that the next refugee crisis was brewing in the Ukraine, I actually underestimated the figures: I suggested that, of the roughly 30 million people in Ukraine who hate Putin, perhaps 1% (300,000) might leave; in reality, the figure is as much as ten times that.
Refugee crises are challenges, and almost always met badly. But, this was what Russia was counting on: by displacing so many people (intentionally – again, due to their style of warfare), forced to move into relatively benign nations, such as Poland, Hungary and (much less likely) Belarus, Russia has laid the foundations for a refugee crisis in Central and Western Europe. It is not necessarily the policies of the receiving countries that will make this a crisis, but the simple numbers – already over four million people have left Ukraine, most of them women and children.
Europe struggled to accommodate one million of the six and a half million Syrian refugees, but even the majority of these numbers arrived in Europe across a period of years, not weeks. This is the worst refugee crisis in Europe in living memory; and unfortunately, the vast majority of refugees are not going to be returning to the country they knew. If the pictures coming out of Ukraine are anything to go by, the level of urban destruction is consistent with both the style of warfare Russia executes, and that of the Second World War. As horrible as it may sound, there is every possibility the refugees will not have a home to return to.
And this goes deeper than a physical home; there may not be a recognisable ‘Ukraine’ at the end of this. It is absurd to think, despite the general consensus amongst the Western media, that Ukraine was without its problems before this war began, and many of them were over far-right groups active in the Azov region, such as the Azov Battalion. The prevalence of ultra-nationalist, and even active Nazis in some cases, in the Ukraine is something the West has sought to paper-over, and Putin has sought to exacerbate, but the honest truth is that this is a real and enduring problem for Ukrainian politicians. Some even compared the defensive war that Ukraine is fighting to the final days of the Third Reich and the Allied bombing campaign.
This has been going on for longer than we might want to admit. In 2018, the Kievan “National Militia” attacked local government meetings in order to strong-arm them into policies they favoured; in 2019, the Azov Battalion and other far-right groups (Dnipro-1 Battallion as well) carried out pogroms on minorities; and the ultra-nationalist party Svoboda – which has 15,000 members and has a parliamentary presence in the Verkohvna Rada – is regularly accused of neo-Nazi sympathies, not to mention the fact that Belitsky, leader of the Azovs, is a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.
Russia’s campaign has made these internal divisions public knowledge; it is spurious to pretend that Russia’s ‘de-Nazification’ claims are accurate to the situation, but it cannot be ignored that there is a major presence of National Socialists in the Ukraine.
Why will Russia’s ‘special military campaign’ make this situation worse? Put simply, the immediate (and, it must be said, necessary) arming of civilians in order to fight the Russian invasion will have long, long term consequences. Whenever this war ends – which may be longer than we want to imagine – Ukraine will be facing the problem of what to do with a well-armed, combat-experienced, pissed off population. When the United States armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was seen as a necessary use of paramilitary forces to resist (again) Russian aggression. Now, Afghanistan is a mess of guerilla groups, Islamist fundamentalists and radical separatists. This whole situation was made worse by the
This problem extends to normal politics as well; Volodymyr Zelensky has dismantled the free press, claimed a conspiracy exists to oust him, and has outlawed the existence of eleven pro-Russian political parties, one of which had 10% of the Ukrainian parliament.
So, when the dust settles, Ukraine will have to contend with the reality of neo-Nazis with modern arms such as NLAWS, displaced and angry civilians with access to combat weaponry, and a gutting of as much as 10% of its population that is abroad with no home to return to.
Putin does not need to take Ukraine, or even necessarily enforce the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk. Instead, in many ways, he has done what he really needed to do; destabilise the West’s big player on its border, and likely the rest of Europe for a long time.
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